CFP: NAVSA 2011 at Vanderbilt "Performance and Play" (3/1; 11/3-6/2011)

The North American Victorian Studies Association invites proposals for its annual conference in Nashville, TN, November 3-6, 2011. We seek papers related to the conference theme of “Performance and Play,” in keeping with the conference’s location in Nashville, a historic center for musical and artistic innovation. Featured speakers will include Tom Gunning, Catherine Robson, and Carolyn Williams. Participants will also have the opportunity to sign up for topic-based seminars in which members pre-circulate 5-page position papers for discussion. Each seminar will be led by an expert in the topic and participants will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis (limit of 15 presenters per seminar).

Conference threads might include:

• Music, musicians, singers, music halls
• Opera, light opera, dance, melodrama
• The theater world: players, playwrights, producers, directors, stagecraft
• Early cinema, magic lantern shows, optical toys
• Audiences, publics, receptions, reviews
• Performances of the self, gender, race, nationality
• Posture, pose, gesture, manner, style
• Timing, training, discipline, skill, perfectionism
• Imitation, impersonation, masquerade, theatricality
• Ceremonies, rituals, routines
• Art-making in public, studio tours, readings
• Performance at home, in private; female accomplishments
• Tourist productions, ethnographic shows
• Leisure, recreation, sport, games, holidays
• Entertainment, fairs, pageantry, parades
• Sexual play, eroticism, dalliance, hedonism
• Gambling, gaming, horse-racing, card games
• Bodies in motion: fighting, fencing, hunting, exercising
• Jokes, jests, wordplay, comedy, playfulness, fun
• Forms of play, linguistic play, nonsense, verse play
• Children’s play, toys, games

Proposals for individual papers should be no longer than 500 words, and should be accompanied by a one-page curriculum vitae. The organizers welcome panel proposals, as well. Panel proposals should include 500-word abstracts for each paper and a one-page c.v. for each presenter, along with a panel title and 250-word panel description. All abstracts will be considered for the conference, regardless of panel acceptance. Proposals for papers and panels should be submitted electronically to navsa2011@gmail.com as an attachment in .doc or .pdf format, and are due by March 1, 2011. All presenters at the conference must be current members of NAVSA.

For more information visit http://vanderbilt.edu/navsa/

CFP: Graduate Prize - 2011 VanArsdel Prize (4/1/2011)

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) invites graduate students to submit essays for the 2011 VanArsdel Prize for the best graduate student essay on, about, or extensively using Victorian periodicals. Manuscripts should be 15-25 pages and should not have appeared in print. The winner will receive $300 and publication in Victorian Periodicals Review. Send paper submissions by 1 April 2011 to Kathryn Ledbetter, Department of English, 601 University Drive, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas 78666-4616. Please include a description of current status in graduate school.

For more information about RSVP and the VanArsdel Prize click here.

CFP: The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism: Middlebrow Writing 1890-1930 (1/31, 9/15-16/2011)

The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism:

Middlebrow Writing 1890-1930

15-16 September 2011

Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Keynote speakers: Professor Ann Ardis (University of Delaware, USA),
Professor Adina Ciugureanu (Ovidius University Constanta, Romania)

The increase in modernist and avant-garde cultural manifestations in the early years of the twentieth century displaced realist and traditional literary works from, in Bourdieu's sense, "legitimate" culture. The former came to represent "highbrow," with a concomitant exclusion of all that highbrow was not. Even influential and critically acclaimed writers, such as H. G. Wells, were derided for maintaining their realist style, as well as for catering to popular taste. Retrospectively, the conception of modernism has been expanded in order to be able to accommodate less obviously avant-garde works, but this expansion may not be continued indefinitely. Lines of demarcation between high, low, mass, and middle, in their varying media and forms, need to be identified to enable a more nuanced understanding of the evolution of literary and other cultural forms in this period, and the contemporary reception of the texts and ideas expressed therein.

This conference seeks to examine the emergence of modernism outside elitist, avant-garde notions, particularly focusing on middlebrow literature in its relation to these socio-cultural developments. We assume that, even though middlebrow fiction usually adheres to conspicuously affirmative structures of plot development in order to meet genre expectations and publishers' requirements, this narrative framework is often in a disintegrative state, in form and subject. Such narratives raise disturbing issues concerning the crumbling Empire, collapsing class structures, and the deterioration of the Victorian family ideal. For women, in particular, the middlebrow novel provided a space for the negotiation of and experimentation with alternative social and gender roles. In this sense, middlebrow writing can be regarded as a domestication of modernist themes also prevalent at the time, allowing unsettling issues to be raised while maintaining at least a superficial impression of (narrative) stability and security. Based on the assumption that such works reached a far wider audience than those of the avant-garde, by exploring such issues of stability and disintegration this conference aims to advance research on the production, dissemination, and reception of middlebrow and popular fiction between 1890-1930.

Papers are invited which address these themes, and those linked to them, with the common factors being the study of textual works produced during the period 1890-1930, in the "British" world.

The conference is organised by Professor Christoph Ehland (University of Paderborn) and Dr. Kate Macdonald (University of Ghent). Please send proposals tokate.macdonald@ugent.be and to cornelia.waechter@uni-paderborn.de by 31 January 2011.

For the conference website, click here.

CFP: Columbia Graduate Conference - The Politics of Form (2/6/2011; 4/22/2011)

The Politics of Form: 2011 Graduate Student Conference

Columbia University Nineteenth-Century Colloquium

Friday, April 22th, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Caroline Levine

In recent years, Victorian studies have seen a resurgence of interest in literary form and formalist criticism. However, these renewed formal interests do not represent a simple swing of the critical pendulum. Rather than retreating from historicism, current critical models seek to amend and complicate New Historicist practices by combining them with examinations of genre, aesthetics, and other formal concerns. Recent work along these lines has been characterized by an attentiveness to form in the service of historically specific claims and an interest in the historical specificity of nineteenth-century literary forms and their cultural meaning. Correspondingly, the conscious significance of literary form and genre to the Victorians themselves is a topic ripe for further examination.

This conference seeks to explore what is particularly at stake for Victorian literary studies in this turn towards form. In particular, we encourage papers on the integration of formalist and historicist praxis, but we also welcome papers exploring the future of either field. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Nineteenth-century literary criticism
• Aesthetics and aestheticism
• Social custom, conventions, and etiquette
• Form and the marriage plot
• Reading practices
• Economic and political systems as “forms”
• Ekphrasis
• Fetishism
• Genre theory, theory of the novel
• Historical fiction
• Formalism and feminism
• Queer studies after Foucault
• Historicism today, formalism today, New Formalism
• Symptomatic and surface reading; close vs. distant reading
• Book theory
• Digitization and Victorian archives
• Quantitative literary criticism (statistics, graphs, diagrams, charts, etc.)
• E-texts and reading practices

Abstracts of 300 words should be sent to Anna Clark via email at aec2137@columbia.edu by February 6th. Please bear in mind that final papers should take between 15 and 20 minutes (maximum) to deliver. Proposals for panels (comprising three speakers) are welcome please submit the title and a brief description of the panel as well as abstracts for the individual papers.

CFP: Aesthetic Lives (5/1/11, 9/23-9/24/2011)

"[C]reating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be"

Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France

23-24 September 2011

In 1873, citing Hegel’s vision of the Greeks, Walter Pater wrote in The Renaissance: "They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil of their own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be." This Paterian celebration of autonomy and self-fashioning was read with delight, cultivated, and variously implemented by the members of the Aesthetic Movement. Not only did Aestheticism create new objects, but it enabled singular lifestyles to be born. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the facts of existence ceased to be perceived as heteronomous. Life itself was gradually envisioned as a work in progress for an individual at once more aware of his/her freedom as subject and more conscious of changing societal constraints. New lifestyles flourished and novel representations of life emerged. From the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (which immediately preceded the Aesthetic Movement) to James Whistler, Oscar Wilde, William Morris, "Ouida," "Michael Field," or Edward Carpenter, many were those who devoted themselves to practicing and writing about literature and art while evolving a lifestyle which early twentieth-century critics would later identify with the "men [and women] of the nineties."

Fashioning one’s own life became both conceivable and technically and politically possible as individuals gradually ceased to acquiesce in given social configurations of power and value and started interrogating the status quo. Such questioning was often the source of original individual choices and collective interventions such as the creation of clubs, guilds, presses or journals. Within given social, economic and political structures/strictures, of which writers and artists were highly conscious, "Aesthetic" living became an important embodiment of subjective experience and individual experiment.

After our first 2009 trans-disciplinary international conference entitled "British Aestheticisms," our 2011 conference on "Aesthetic Lives" hopes to focus on issues of Aesthetic subjectivity, on the lived experience of Aesthetic individuality or difference, and on original trajectories in the context of Aesthetic practices. How did writers and artists turn their existence into an artwork? What does it mean to found a club, an artistic community, a new journal when one is (or claims to be) an Aesthete? What were the cultural, social, economic or political constraints which hindered or enabled Aesthetic projects, aspirations, and itineraries?

Importantly, the notion of "Aesthetic life" is not meant in the limited biographical sense, but should be taken in the broad sense of a personal negotiation and a carving of one’s chosen itinerary or ethical choices in the context of Aestheticism. What kind of ethics can arise from Aesthetic choices? What are its daily manifestations, practically speaking? What were the obstacles or aporiae encountered by those who followed Pater’s ideas about self-fashioning and life as a work of art? How were these subjective choices received? And how do they anticipate the choices made by the figures of Modernism?

We welcome papers (in French or in English) studying individual artists and writers, specific formal or informal groups, and various arts of Aesthetic living. Descriptive and hagiographic approaches are to be strictly avoided. A selection of papers will be published. Please email your proposal by May 1st 2011 to bncoste@free.fr AND catherine.delyfer@univ-montp3.fr.

Guest speakers to be announced soon.

CFP: Modes of Transport: Travel Writing and Form, 1780-1914 (2/18, 5/26-5/27/2011)

MODES OF TRANSPORT: TRAVEL WRITING AND FORM, 1780-1914
An interdisciplinary conference at King’s College London,

26 & 27 May 2011

Keynote speakers: Mary Beard (Cambridge), Dane Kennedy (George Washington), and Dea Birkett (The Guardian)

There has always been a certain amount of unease and anxiety about how best to mould the quotidian, often repetitious, experience of travel into a digestible, literary narrative. The travel writer cannibalises other modes of literary, geographical, and scientific writing, while simultaneously forging experimental, innovative and dynamic forms in the struggle to represent the heterogeneous and often chaotic experience of travel. It is the aim of this two-day conference to bring together academic researchers and professional travel writers in order to explore the relationship between travel writing and formal innovation in a variety of media across the long-nineteenth century. As Franco Moretti has suggested, "new space gives rise to a new form," and the period 1780-1914 saw the rise of both new technologies of movement and new categories of traveller. We are specifically interested in how new perspectives, networks, and markets enabled by these developments impacted upon literary and media form and how literature in turn affected the ways in which people travelled.

We welcome papers from across a range of academic disciplines, including history, literature, art history, media history, geography and classics. Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Journals and diaries
• Scrapbooks and ephemera
• Souvenirs
• Postcards
• Guides and guidebooks
• Translators
• Travel journalism
• Travel in verse
• Travel on the stage
• Sentimental journeys
• Boring journeys
• Tourists in literature; literary tourists
• Colonial / postcolonial forms
• Reading / drawing maps
• Geography and ethnography
• Repetition
• The portable canon
• Gendered forms

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers from researchers at all stages in their careers. Please send your proposal (max. 250 words) and a brief biography to travelconference@gmail.com by 18 February 2011. Informal enquiries may also be directed to Mary Henes and Brian Murray at the above address.

Supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Institute (KCL) and the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group

http://travelconference.blogspot.com/

CFP: McGill Graduate Conference - Luxuries of the Literary Mind: Readings of Commodity & Privilege (1/14/11; 3/4-6/2011)

17th Annual McGill International Graduate Conference on Language and Literature

McGill University, Montreal

March 4 to 6, 2011

Focus: luxury, privilege, commodity, and consumption in literature, and other texts and cultural artifacts

We invite presentations from all periods and fields of literary study, as well as theatre, film, and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary approaches (e.g., with reference to history, philosophy, science, medicine, economics, art history, religious studies, and other fields) are welcome and encouraged. Potential topics include, but are not limited to the following:

• Class and social standing.
• Wealth and poverty, images of excess and need.
• Human rights (sexual freedoms, disability rights, etc.) versus social privilege
• The racialization of wealth and status.
• The politics of pleasure.
• Iconography, brands and branding, labels, commodity fetishism.
• Consumer behavior and identity.
• Binaries of public/private, high/low, male/female, and consumer/producer central to markets and marketing.
• Literary depictions of shopping, markets, fairs.
• Imperialism, colonialism, trade, and their effects (e.g., environmental degradation, exploitative labor).
• Gift-giving, treasure, hoarding.
• Gender, the body, cosmetic technologies and practices.
• Camp, ostentation, glamor, performance and performativity.
• Fashion and sartorial luxuries.
• Spectacle in film and theater.
• Cultural and aesthetic decadence.
• Literature as a luxury (e.g., book-making expenses & practices, middle- & upper-class education as privilege).
• How has literature shaped or complicated our sense of luxury and commodity?
• How has literature responded to economic or financial fluctuations?
• Gastronomy, epicureanism, connoisseurship, and urbanity.
• Luxury goods and taxes.
• Lifestyle porn (e.g., luxury travel, culture, or celebrity narratives).

We would be delighted to see Victorianists amply represented in our programme. To facilitate the blind-vetting process, please submit the following to mcgillconference2011@gmail.com in .doc, .docx, or .pdf form by Friday, January 14, 2011:

• an anonymous 250-word abstract detailing your proposed paper.
• a separate cover letter including a brief biographical paragraph.

Keynote Speaker Dr. George Toles has published extensively on art and ethics in 19th to 20th-century fiction, drama, and film. His book of film essays is titled A House Made of Light (Wayne State UP, 2001), and his screenwriting collaborations with Guy Maddin include My Winnipeg (2007), Brand Upon the Brain (2006), The Saddest Music in the World (2003), and the upcoming Keyhole, currently in production with Isabella Rossellini and Udo Kier. Dr. Toles' presentation will complement what we hope will be a series of engaging and provocative conference panels.

Conference Organizer: Marc Ducusin

CFP: Libidinal Lives: Economies of Desire in the Long Nineteenth Century (4/1/2011)

Edited Collection. Call For Submissions.

Libidinal Lives: Economies of Desire in the Long Nineteenth Century

In his controversial work Libidinal Economy (1974) Jean-Franҫois Lyotard famously remarked "every political economy is libidinal." With this radical pronouncement, Lyotard identified all hegemonic structures as susceptible to the affective ebb and flow of desire. Forming the cornerstone of the new "libidinal materialism," Libidinal Economy, alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), saw the desiring body as inextricably bound up with economic, political, and fiscal operations. In the decades that followed, a wealth of theoretical work drew on this challenging juxtaposition of the libidinal and the economic. Notably, Lawrence Birkens’s Consuming Desire (1988) postulated a parallel development of sexology and political economy and more recently Regenia Gagnier’s The Insatiability of Human Wants (2000) elaborated on the question of production and reproduction in Victorian Aesthetics.

Building on this important and often contentious body of scholarship, this collection of essays seeks to explore the interrelatedness of desire, sexuality, and economic processes in the literary, scientific, and cultural worlds of the long nineteenth century. Papers might consider the role of libidinal impulses in social and political formations, or question whether desire functions as a cohesive, communal force. They might examine a spectrum of nineteenth-century debates with reference to how they position sexuality as the central and influencing practice in an ideological matrix. In addition they might consider whether we find an undercurrent of competing desires in the patterns of pleasure, production, reproduction and consumption during the nineteenth century, and ask to what extent these desires influenced twentieth and twenty-first century perceptions of the Victorians.

Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Production, consumption, creativity, and libidinal impulses
• Sexual/textual lives
• Commodity/bodily fetishism and pornography
• Political/social bodies of desire
• Gift theory and eroticism
• Non-"normative" libidinal economies of sensation and pleasure: masturbation, fellation, same-sex intimacy
• The gothic, cannibalism, the death drive, and desire
• Imperialist desires and "other" economies
• Colonial and post-colonial legacies and heritage
• Theoretical afterlives, ie., Jean-Franҫois Lyotard, Bataille, Deleuze & Guattari, Eagleton, and Queer Theory, etc.

Please send abstracts of 500 words (for chapters of 6,000-8,000 words) along with a CV to Jane Ford and Kim Edwards Keates to jane.ford@port.ac.uk and kim.edwards@liverpool.ac.uk by April 1, 2011. The deadline for completed essays is 1st October 2011. Any queries are welcomed.

CFP: special number of the Journal of Stevenson Studies: Stevenson, Essayist (2/10/2011)

Stevenson, Essayist: call for papers for a special number of the Journal of Stevenson Studies

Richard Dury (dury@unibg.it) and R-L Abrahamson (rabraham@faculty.ed.umuc.edu) will be guest-editing a special number of the Journal of Stevenson Studies dedicated to "Robert Louis Stevenson, Essayist".

Stevenson's essays are highly regarded and often quoted in discussions of his fiction but little discussed in themselves. We invite brief proposals (with summary CVs of relevant background studies) in any relevant area by 10th February 2011. Selection will be made by the end of February. Manuscripts are to be delivered in September 2011 for publication in mid-2012. Proposals could include the following:

• RLS and the essay tradition up to 1870
• The popular essay in the 1870s and 80s
• 1870s-80s magazines (London, New York) and the market for essays
• The Cornhill essays
• The Scribner’s essays
• RLS’s methods of composition
• RLS’s essay personas
• The reputation of RLS’s essays (early years, fame, hagiography, rejection, current views)
• RLS’s essay style
• RLS’s essays and Scotland
• RLS’s essays on America and American topics
• RLS’s essays on France and French topics
• RLS’s historical essays
• RLS’s essays and science
• RLS’s essays on literature
• RLS’s essays and the visual arts
• RLS’s essays and travel
• RLS’s essays and ethics

Click here for more information on the Journal of Stevenson Studies.

CFP: BAVS Conference 2011: Composition and Decomposition (3/31/2011; 9/1 - 9/3/2011)

Call for Papers: BAVS Conference 2011, University of Birmingham

Composition and Decomposition

The University of Birmingham will be hosting the 2011 BAVS Conference, 1–3 September 2011, on the Edgbaston campus. We invite papers that deal with the conference theme of "Composition and Decomposition" in all its various connotations.

This theme reflects Birmingham’s own nineteenth-century history as the "workshop the world." Birmingham is a city intimately connected with industry and manufacture. However, one of its main exports in the nineteenth century was pens. Our conference thus draws on the double of meaning of composition as both artistic practice and broader industrial process. At a time when the country as a whole, and this city in particular, is reflecting upon the legacy of industrial decline, this conference also invites speakers to think about its inverse, decomposition.

We invite participants to engage with the theme widely and imaginatively. Papers might be on the following:

• Decadence, decay, and degeneration.
• Formal composition or simply of what things are made.
• Putting things together, taking things apart.
• Waste and recycling; the return of discarded things.
• Ingredients, inventories, and other types of list.
• The role of composition in the practice of fine art, music, literature, and drama.
• Architecture and town planning.
• Scientific analysis and processes.
• The material culture of composition, whether draft manuscripts, laboratory equipment, or processes of manufacture.
• Industrialization, industrial processes, and industrial cultures.
• The importance of form and formal methodologies.
• Composition and the press; printing and print culture.
• The politics of deconstruction, whether as methodology or historical event (clearances, demolition, etc.).

Please send proposals (500 words max) to bavs2011@googlemail.com no later than 31 March 2011. Please direct any queries about the conference to the organizers at the above address.

Please note that the increasing popularity of BAVS as a conference where scholars of Victorian Studies share their research means that, unfortunately, not all offers of papers can be accepted.

The 2011 Conference hosts will select offers of papers according to the criteria of quality, engagement with the Conference theme, and with due regard to accepting papers from a spread of disciplinary areas, to support postgraduate research, and to fulfil BAVS’ commitment to interdisciplinarity.

Click here for more information on BAVS.

CFP: 2011 Trollope Prize (6/1/2011)

Call for Submissions: The 2011 Trollope Prize

It is with great pleasure that we announce the 2011 Trollope Prize, sponsored by the English Department and the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas.

The Trollope Prize will be awarded to the best undergraduate and graduate essays in English on the works of Anthony Trollope. Essays are invited on the topic of "Trollope and His World." Submissions may include essays focusing exclusively on the works of Anthony Trollope; comparative essays on Trollope and other writers; essays examining Trollope's work and career in the larger context of Victorian history, culture and society; historical or literary essays on topics central to Trollope's work and illuminated by his work; or essays on the reception of Trollope's work or on his larger cultural influence.

Beginning in 2011, two prizes will be awarded: one to an essay written by an undergraduate student and one to an essay written by a graduate student. The writers of the winning undergraduate essay will receive a $1,000 award and a hardcover copy of a Trollope novel. The winning undergraduate student's faculty adviser will also receive a $500 award to help support the continued development of curriculum focusing on Trollope's works. The graduate winner will receive a $2,000 award and a hardcover copy of a Trollope novel.

All essays must be received by June 1, 2011. Winners will be announced in August 2011.

Please visit the new website at trollopeprize.ku.edu for more information about the prize, including submission criteria and guidelines.

Thank you,

Lauren Harmsen Kiehna, on behalf of the Trollope Prize Committee at the University of Kansas

Click here to download flyer.

CFP: Rudyard Kipling: an International Writer International Conference (3/31/2011; 10/21-10/22/2011)

Rudyard Kipling: an International Writer

Institute of English Studies, London

October 21-22, 2011

Keynote Speakers: Amit Chaudhuri and Charles Allen

"Left and right of my writing-table were two big globes, on one of which a great airman had once outlined in white paint those air-routes to the East and Australia which were well in use before my death." - Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself

Kipling, hailed as "an interpreter of Empire" (Times, 18 Jan 1936), was regarded as a national institution when he died in 1936, and his funeral in Westminster Abbey was attended by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. His current reputation is many-sided: sometimes condemned as a racist who embodied the imperial mind-set or dismissed as a writer "whom nobody read," he is increasingly both value and criticized for his complex response to the "otherness" and diversity of races and classes in his writing.

This conference, sponsored by the Kipling Society, focuses on the figure of Kipling as an international writer. It seeks not only to re-assess Kipling’s involvement in imperial ideology, but also to examine his interests in wider international affairs and his connections with foreign locations both within and outside the British Empire. The conference thereby aims to re-examine his work and achievement by exploring his diverse roles as an internationalist, and by considering his relevance to our post-modern globalizing world. Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Travels and travel writing

• Anglo-American relationships

• Anglo-Indian journalism

• War journalism and propaganda

• Inter-colonial networks

• Imperialism and cosmopolitanism

• Kipling’s writing on India, and other colonies

• Dislocation and returning: exiles, immigrants, expatriates

• Islam and other world religions

• Jews and anti-Semitism

• Kipling and Freemasonry

• Englishness and place

• The literature of modern technology

• The sea and sailors

• Postcolonial responses to Kipling

• Kipling’s place in modernism and other international literary movements

• Intertextuality and literary traditions

• The literature of "other" places (France, Scandinavia, Japan, etc.)

Send your proposals of 150-300 words for 20-minute papers to J.E.Montefiore@kent.ac.uk by 31 March 2011, entering your email subject as International Kipling 2011.

Conference Organizers: Professor Jan Montefiore and Dr. Kaori Nagai

CFP: Victorian Futures at the Dickens Universe (12/15/10; 7/29-31/2011)

DEADLINE reminder: "Victorian Futures at the Dickens Universe"

University of California, Santa Cruz

July 29-31, 2011

The Dickens Project invites paper proposals for a conference on Victorian Futures, with keynote speakers Jay Clayton (author of Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture) and Andrew Elfenbein (author of Romanticism and the Rise of English). The conference will be held at the University of California, Santa Cruz, beginning on the evening of Friday, July 29 and concluding at lunch-time on Sunday, July 31; papers will be allocated to "threads" to facilitate developing conversations of specific themes and topics. Submit 1-2 page abstracts and a short c.v. to Rebecca Stern (stern2@mailbox.sc.edu) by December 15, 2010.

Papers and panel proposals relevant to the theme of Victorian Futures are welcome. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Progress and its Discontents
• Prediction, Probability, Risk, Speculation, Gambling
• Visions and the Visionary
• Romantic Futures, Victorian Presents
• Utopia/Dystopia
• Science Fiction (the "futuristic")
• Futures that Never Happened (counterfactuals; counterfictions; narratological explorations of tenses future and conditional; the optative)
• The Birth of the Author (as historical fact, as biographical challenge, as a critical category)
• Heavens and Hells
• Victorian Pasts and Presents (and, of course, Futures)
• Victorian Afterlives
• Futures for Victorian Studies

Participants in Victorian Futures are cordially invited to spend all or part of the week following the conference in the redwoods of central California at the annual gathering of the Dickens Universe, an international research group devoted to the study of the novels of Charles Dickens and Victorian literature and culture.

The Dickens Universe's study of Great Expectations begins on July 31 and concludes on the evening of Friday, August 5. Confirmed speakers for the week include Andrew Miller, Jonathan Grossman, Kathleen Frederickson, Teresa Mangum, Claire Jarvis, Helena Michie, Joe Childers, and David Kurnick.

Academic participants in Victorian Futures who wish to stay on for the Universe will have the opportunity to sign up for one of three established Working Groups, which will meet Monday through Wednesday (see below). They may also convene their own Working Group or participate in the Dickens Universe's Nineteenth-Century Seminar. Scholars may thus use the week as an opportunity for extended discussion and scholarly exchange, either with established collaborators or with new acquaintances. Academic participants in the Universe will experience its wide range of scholarly and convivial events; they will also have the opportunity to make a twenty-minute presentation about their current scholarly project in the Nineteenth-Century Seminar, which meets four times during the week.

Please consider the following options:

(i) Attend Victorian Futures as a speaker or participant.

(ii) Attend the Universe as a participant, with the option of joining the Nineteenth-Century Seminar. For further information about the Universe, please direct your questions to John Jordan (picasso@cats.ucsc.edu); write to Catherine Robson (Catherine.robson@nyu.edu) to learn more about the Nineteenth-Century Seminar.

(iii) Attend the Universe as part of a working group. Established groups include Victorian Economics, coordinated by Nancy Henry (nhenry3@utk.edu); Victorian Poetry, coordinated by Tricia Lootens (tlootens@uga.edu); and Nineteenth-Century Sciences, coordinated by Rebecca Stern (stern2@mailbox.sc.edu). You may also convene your own group and/or use the lovely Santa Cruz campus as a venue for meeting with established collaborators. For more information about a particular group, please contact the organizer. For more information about working groups in general, please contact Rebecca Stern.

About the Dickens Project: The Dickens Project hosts a conference at the end of each July on the beautiful wooded campus of UC Santa Cruz above Monterey Bay; this event, the "Dickens Universe," traditionally brings together around 200 people to conduct an intensive study of a single Dickens novel.

Of these individuals, roughly half are members of the general public, and half are faculty and students, post-graduate and undergraduate. Thirty two universities are currently members of the Dickens Project Consortium, each sending Victorianist faculty and students to the Universe every year: members include Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Indiana, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and NYU in the United States; Exeter, Birkbeck, and Royal Holloway in Great Britain; plus universities in Israel and Australia. The Dickens Project has earned a reputation as a leading research collective for both Dickens and Victorian studies, and, through its development of a range of events for post-graduates (including an annual winter conference for the delivery of their early academic papers), has established itself as a prominent supporter of the careers of junior Victorianists.

Go to http://www2.ucsc.edu/dickens/ for more information.

CFP: Transport in British Fiction: 1840-1940 (1/15/2011)

Expanded Call for Papers: Transport in British Fiction: 1840-1940 (Collection of Critical Essays)

The editors are seeking proposals for essays to complete a collection of critical essays currently in progress on transport in British fiction 1840-1940. Because of a recent decision to expand the chronological range covered by the volume we are now seeking proposals on:

• Dickens and transport
• Transport in 1840s and/or 1850s fiction, especially trains
• Transport in 1930s fiction

The collection aims to assess transport’s position in literary consciousness during a century of rapid social, cultural, and vehicular change. Essays should focus centrally on the use of transport or forms of transportation in novels, novellas, or short stories during this period and might consider, for example:

• the narrative role of transport
• the contextual or historical picture of transport presented in fiction
• the representation of specific transport vehicles
• transport within the context of an author’s approach to new technologies
• transport and gender
• transport and class
• transport and sexualities

Other approaches to transport in British fiction during this period will also be considered. Proposals are welcomed on single authors or on topics which range across writers, subgenres, or periods of British fiction.

We envisage that completed essays will be 5,600 words long and due in May 2011.

Please email 500-word proposals and a 150-200-word biography by 15 January to BOTH editors: Adrienne Gavin (Adrienne.gavin@canterbury.ac.uk) and Andrew Humphries (Andrew.humphries@canterbury.ac.uk).

CFP: Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Narratives, Histories and Collections (2/15, 7/14-7/15/2011)

"Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Narratives, Histories and Collections"

14-15 July 2011

Lincoln, UK

In the nineteenth century, railways made distant locations ever more accessible, the Grand Tour became more and more a pastime of the middle classes, and British imperial expansion brought exotic locales and non-Western cultures ever closer to home. New ways of thinking about and communicating experiences of travel and of interactions with other cultures held a significant influence in various areas of nineteenth-century culture. This period saw an enormous expansion in museums and popular exhibition culture, technological innovations, such as photography and film, as well as the vast growth of a popular press that served to deliver these experiences, images, and objects to an increasingly literate public. This public in turn seemed to possess an insatiable appetite for travel narratives, shows, and exhibitions, both fictional and factual.

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the divergent and complex ways in which travel was understood and communicated in the nineteenth century. Contributors are invited to investigate the depiction and representation of travel in as wide a variety of media and for as wide a variety of audiences as possible. We seek submissions from historians, literary scholars, art historians, anthropologists, and material culture scholars, which illuminate the narratives—popular, academic, private or official—that surrounded travel in the period.

Plenary speakers will be James Buzard (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Geoff Quilley (Sussex University), and Nicholas Thomas (Cambridge University).

We invite papers on themes such as:

• The construction of ideas of the real and the virtual or authenticity and distance through travel narratives
• Different venues for narrating travel, including the domestic, and the way such venues affected the consumption of travel narratives
• Forms of travelling individuals, such as the missionary, the explorer, the tourist, the connoisseur, or the scientist, and how they were constructed by texts, images, and objects
• Different audiences for travel narratives – in literature, exhibitions, private patronage of artists, or in museums and private collections
• How different narratives framed and constructed the moment of encounter with the cultural other in travel
• The role of technology in enabling new narratives of travel and how narratives of travel described technology
• Travelling in time as well as travelling in space

We also invite session proposals that map onto the themes listed above. Session proposals should include a brief outline of the session (300 words), as well as three abstracts (300 words each) for the proposed session.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to Kate Hill (khill@lincoln.ac.uk), Laurie Garrison (lgarrison@lincoln.ac.uk), or Claudia Capancioni (claudia.capancioni@bishopg.ac.uk). The closing date for proposals is February 15, 2011.

Click here for the conference website: http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/conferences/travel_in_the_19th_century/

CFP: VISAWUS 2011: "The Vulgar and the Proper: Victorian Manners & Mores" (3/15, 10/13-15/2011)

16th ANNUAL CONFERENCE of the VICTORIAN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES ASSOCIATION OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES (VISAWUS)

"The Vulgar and the Proper: Victorian Manners and Mores"

October 13-15, 2011

Houston, TX

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Helena Michie, English, Rice University, author, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies; Sororophobia: Differences among Women in Literature and Culture; Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal; co-author, Confinements: Fertility and Infertility in Contemporary Culture, and co- editor, 19th-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century. PLENARY SPEAKER: Lynn Voskuil, English, University of Houston, author, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity, and essays in Victorian Studies, Feminist Studies, and ELH. Her current project is entitled "Horticulture and Imperialism: The Garden Spaces of the British Empire."

The 16th annual conference focuses on Victorian obsessions with vulgarity and propriety. We invite proposals on manners and mores in politics, culture, society, religion, art, science, economics, rural life, and other Victorian matters of decorum and propriety and what Victorians deemed vulgar, crude or crass. We encourage papers across all disciplines, including (but not restricted to) art history, literature, gender, history of science, history, material culture, political science, performance, life writings, journalism, photography, popular culture, and economics.

By March 15, 2011 email 300-word abstract and 1-page CV (name on BOTH) to: Laurel.Williamson@sjcd.edu.

Download the full CFP here, and click here for more information on VISAWUS.